


mayakovsky

by somethingdifferent



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, F/M, POV Alternating, haha I'm dying, this ship is actually ruining me I'll have you know, will soon be ruined with canon probably but hey a girl can dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 01:43:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3156263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's funny, she thinks. She hardly realized how close he had gotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mayakovsky

_I love you. I love you,_  
 _but I'm turning to my verses_  
 _and my heart is closing_  
 _like a fist._

 

Frank O'Hara

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The phone rings, and she flinches.

"Don't," he murmurs, tired, pressing the heel of his palm against his eye, "don't, don't answer it."

She looks around this room, the same one every time, even when it isn't. The smooth walls, the hardwood floor, the unremarkable furniture. Had they been other people, had these been other circumstances, she could imagine how this house might have once been a home.

Still, as it is.

(Answer it, she thinks. _Answer it._ )

Still, the sound of the telephone, shrill and accusing, as it rings through.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

It started, as these things do, innocently enough. He was given a specific job, a simple enough request. He isn't one to question every whim of his employer, and Miss Carter seemed to be, at first glance, an easy enough problem to solve. A straightforward, brutal sort of woman, the kind who knows immediately and intimately the proper way in which to look down the barrel of a gun.

He was never really like that, of course. Until he met Miss Carter, he had rarely seen such an object as a gun in the flesh.

Before he met Miss Carter, he supposes, he hadn't seen a number of things.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

"We could pretend," he suggests, begs maybe. It's hard to tell sometimes, now. "Just for a little while, we could."

She takes a moment, lets her hair fall back over her shoulder. From here, the window looks out over the lawn, all green and wide. Now, at night, it seems more ordinary than she previously thought. Peggy puts his ring back on the dresser and curls away from him as he reaches for her arm.

"Don't we always," she says, and it isn't a question.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

Certain distasteful aspects of the whole situation are, unfortunately, unavoidable. As a butler - and this means a true English butler, not simply some garden variety manservant - he has developed a certain tact (lies by omission, to put it more coarsely) that has served him well over the years.

"Lying" to Miss Carter, as naturally as it comes to him early on, begins to wear faster than he initially anticipated. He knew it would, such a thing is difficult to prevent when one works so closely with the very person one needs to "lie" to, but he hadn't expected the emotions that came along with such a realization.

Shame, of course. Guilt, to a slightly larger degree. Even weariness, settling in his head like sand in an hourglass. And something else, something he can't name, even as he feels it drifting in and out of himself, even as it claws its way up from his chest to his throat, his eyes, his mouth. And this, this is the worst part: he doesn't notice it as it happens. It simply appears, immovable as stone, suddenly as tangible and present as any other part of himself.

(He puts his hand on Miss Carter's knee, his fingers resting on the bare skin of her leg, and he doesn't even notice until she glances down at the traitorous limb.)

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

From the very start she knew it. One day, she thought on their second meeting, he will leave, and she will likely be sad to see him go. Peggy has had this sort of premonition before - she can remember so clearly a thin, brittle sort of soldier and Europe as it burned - and she was as right then as she is now.

She should have known, even from that second meeting. There's more than one kind of leaving. More than one kind of sorrow.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

One day, he thought, he will leave her to her own devices, and he will be sad to have to go, but go he will.

One day, he thinks, he will leave her, and she will leave him in return, and he will be heartbroken.

Just as he always knew.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

In the end, it was her own fault, her own doing. Like before, she allowed herself to grow attached to something she knew couldn't possibly last, couldn't possibly stay like she wanted. Like before, she made the mistake of allowing herself to want at all.

"Ed," she calls him once, and winces.

His hand feels too at home tangling through her hair, too familiar as it traces over her skin, and too alien as it moves away.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

One day, he thinks, they will leave each other.

He just hopes she beats him to it.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

She opens her mouth for a reason she won't be able to recall later, for a myriad reasons she won't be able to grasp at in a minute or so.

If she keeps her eyes closed, she thinks, and then it becomes a mantra, a litany running through her head - if she keeps her eyes closed, if she keeps her eyes closed, if she keeps her eyes closed, then maybe, maybe, _maybe_.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

He spends too long getting the bloodstains out of his suits. His wife grows more suspicious with each passing day, uncertain at his long hours, when he leaves their bed late at night on "business," the way he has burned the last three of their dinners watching the telephone. And now this, at least two loads of his laundry a week, the washing he insists on doing himself.

There is blood on his collar, blood on his hands, and it's not even his own.

"Your employer," she says once at the dinner table, her voice deceptively soft and sweet, disguising the anger he knows she feels, "has kept you quite busy recently, hasn't he?"

Jarvis swallows reflexively, swallows again, finally realizes that there is a lump in his throat entirely unrelated to dinner.

"It's been hectic," he replies, another half-truth, another lie to add to the list. "Since the war. It'll be quiet again soon."

Two days later he burns the suit he was wearing to that dinner. Unsalvageable, despite his best efforts. That seems to be happening more and more these days.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

She tears her stitches. It's something stupid, just scraping her leg against the wall, but Angie notices enough to ask why she's bleeding and Peggy has to make up something about cutting herself shaving.

"What were you using, a knife?" Angie calls after her as she runs out of the building.

Jarvis fixes her up again, this time in the backseat of the car, and he sews her hem shorter to cover the blood.

"You shouldn't," he begins, then seems to think better of it and pauses.

"I shouldn't what?" Peggy asks, suddenly angry, suddenly furious at him. At how sure he already is around her. At how he already knows her. At how his hands don't shake as he threads the needle through her clothes, through her skin.

There's a tic in his jaw, and for a moment it looks as if he may say something in reply, then all at once the fight goes out of him and he simply says, "nothing," before snipping the last bit of thread on her skirt and leaning away again.

It's funny, she thinks. She hardly realized how close he had gotten.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

It feels sometimes like they're each just extensions of the other, each a stranger in a strange land, each remembering with a jolt the exact person they are trying so desperately to forget, each barreling forward with the other because to do otherwise would be impossible, unthinkable.

Sometimes it feels as if she's just another part of himself. Sometimes it feels that if he were to take a breath, she would be breathing in as well, the same air at the same time with the same lungs.

"We could pretend," he tells her once, and knows the whole time that it isn't true.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

The telephone sounds again, and he answers it on the third ring.

It doesn't feel as much like victory as she thought it would.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

It was his fault, he decides later.

But this is only after he has exhausted every other option.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

She opens her eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this is from Frank O'Hara's poem, quoted at the beginning, which in turn takes its title from real life. Vladimir Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and she, as well as World War I, influenced much of his work.


End file.
